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Notes -
It’s actually pretty ingenious how it’s done. Current implementations work by engineering a graduated pipeline that becomes increasingly computationally expensive, because in this network model the sandbox isn’t “one thing.” The way it works in practice is a tiered system that goes something like this…
At a basic, level 1 containment, computation is fairly lightweight. This is where most requests get handled. It’ll use say WebAssembly runtimes and information fidelity is low. It’s a restricted environment that understands only a subset of system calls that it’s looking at, to see what the file under the microscope is going to attempt. Its computational overhead is in the microseconds only. If the program calls an unmapped syscall, it gets both blocked and flagged. This is the first step.
Level 2 takes things even further. If a guest exhibits complex requirements to run (e.g. networking, multi-threading, etc…) you employ systems like Google’s gVisor which acts as a sentry that creates a user-space kernel. The guest thinks it’s talking to Linux but in reality it’s talking to a Go-based reimplementation of the Linux API, to mimic the standard features the payload is looking for. The fidelity is much higher because it’s using the host system’s resources through a proxy layer, and avoids the massive memory tax of a full on VM. This is how they catch malware that uses standard syscalls in very non-standard patterns.
Level 3 is the highest form this kind of sandboxing takes and this is the “mirror world” I referred to. It’s essentially a full on MicroVM. If your detection efficiency ratio indicates a higher than average probability of a zero-day or something high risk, there’s a transparent migration that takes place where this sandbox becomes active. They use tech like Amazon’s Firecracker or QEMU/KVM instances that instantiate a MicroVM. This is where the highest cost gets paid. A fully virtualized BIOS gets provided; a complete guest kernel and an isolated/dedicated hardware emulation. The system tricks them into thinking they haven’t been moved by using lazy memory migration and stateful handoff’s, meaning the memory state of level 2 gets directly mapped to the level 3 VM in real-time.
The logic for using the tiered system model is its economic sustainability. The computational resources are conserved at level’s 1&2 that subsidize the extreme costs at level 3. By the time a threat actor reaches the high fidelity mirror world, they’ve already spent their most valuable asset; which is their stealth. They’re trapped in a world that’s bit-for-bit identical to their target, but every interaction is being recorded by an out-of-band hypervisor they can’t see, can’t touch and can’t defeat.
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